INTERVIEW

STEVE McCURRY: CAPTURING THE FACE OF ASIA

Steve McCurry: Khumbha Mela Festival,
Haridwar, India, 1998

By C.B.Liddell

BANGKOK, 20 JUNE 2007—
Some well-known photographers struggle to capture the surly sneer of an over-made-up supermodel. Steve
McCurry, by contrast, has made a career out of getting ‘close up and
personal’ with an entire continent. Culturekiosque caught up with the
legendary lensman on a photo shoot in Thailand to find out more from the
man whose iconic image of an Afghan refugee on the cover of National
Geographic
in 1984 became
not only a symbol of the defiance of the Afghan peoples to
the Soviet invasion but also a symbol of humanity’s endurance.

"In New York people are trying to assimilate, and to
some extent conform to the laws and the customs and the traditions. You
simply don’t get the same kind of raw, original culture that you get on
the streets of Calcutta or Kabul. "

Last year McCurry published Looking East , a near
life-sized collection of some of his most astounding portraits from his many
years working in Asian countries, including the famous shot of Sharbat Gula,
the young Pashtun orphan he encountered in 1984 at the Nasir Bagh refugee
camp in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, and whom he tracked
down 18 years later to find married with three kids. Why has this one
picture become so famous, even more than all the other outstanding shots
he has taken over his long career?

"I think it’s a combination of several things," the 57-year-old
Philadelphia native answers. "First of all she’s a very beautiful little
girl. I think there’s an ambiguity, a mystery about her expression. I
think there’s a kind of haunted, troubled quality on one level, but
there’s also fortitude, perseverance, respect, and pride to her look. It’s
clear that she’s poor. She has this torn shawl. But with her poverty she
has this dignity."

Steve McCurry: Sharbat Gula, Nasir Bagh refugee camp, Pakistan,
1984

Ambiguity, in this case the girl’s expression, has always played a
vital part in art, going back to the Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile. But there
is another ambiguity at play here as well, one of whether the girl is
different from us or similar to us. To most Westerners, Afghanistan is the
end of the Earth, a dangerous, mysterious place where they assume the
people to be completely alien. Yet McCurry’s picture shows a girl who,
with a change of clothes, could effortlessly blend into any Western
society. Surely, this is also part of this image’s appeal for
Westerners?

"Well, that’s a good point," McCurry responds. "Afghanistan, being the
crossroads of culture, there’s a segment of the population that came down
with Genghis Khan, the Hazaras. Then you have a very strong Indian
influence. Then some of these people, you would swear they were Western
European. If they were walking down the street in Munich, Paris or Milan,
they would look like the local people. There’s an interesting mix of
cultures in Afghanistan and I think her face and her look illustrates
that. It’s not an identifiable look. It’s a sort of a mix. She looks kind
of Western and she looks kind of Afghan."

But ultimately the main appeal of McCurry’s work is that he shows us
something different from our one-size-fits-all, modernist global, urban
world. In his beautifully taken photographs, he shows us a continent of
incredible diversity. This has always been the region’s main attraction
for him.

"There’s such a variety of culture, and there’s such a range between
different countries and regions," he enthuses. "The difference between
Pakistan and Afghanistan was so radical, and then from that culture over
to Nepal and Tibet. I found such interesting religions, from Islam over to
Buddhism, Hinduism, the Sikhs, the Jains, the Parsees, all sorts of
things."

Steve McCurry: Kabul, Afghanistan, 1992

But this is not the Politically Correct
‘diversity’ that we hear so much about in the West – a superficial,
hothouse phenomenon, cosseted ironically by the anti-Eurocentric agenda of
liberal-left, middle-class Whites and financed by public funding. The
diversity that exists on the rugged face of Asia, by contrast, is one that
stands on its own two feet; a diversity that has established itself
through centuries of struggle, and adaptation to harsh environments and
the pressures of neighboring groups. Although McCurry praises the
multiculturalism of Western cities, there is a sense that the diversity is
not as authentic as it is in Asia.

"There is an amazing mix of culture in New York, but it’s completely
different," he explains. "In New York people are trying to assimilate, and
to some extent conform to the laws and the customs and the traditions. You
simply don’t get the same kind of raw, original culture that you get on
the streets of Calcutta or Kabul. In a place like Tibet, Buddhism is a very important part of
people’s lives. I think of these monks who prostrate themselves from their
village to Lhasa, and sometimes it takes months and even years. That’s a
very different situation from life in the States or Europe. In India there
are literally millions of people who live on the streets. In New York
there are probably a few thousand. In India there are millions of families
who live their entire lives literally on the streets in cardboard boxes.
That’s a significant difference."

McCurry’s work is all about documenting these fascinating and authentic
differences. From a turbaned Sikh schoolboy in Kabul with a rubber-ended
pencil sticking out of his blazer pocket that hints at the residual
influence of British colonial influence on this region, to the ancient
face of a Tibetan monk whose leathery wrinkled skin seems to reflect the
rugged landscape and dry air of Tibet, McCurry’s portraits often succeed
in giving us a sense of the history, geography, climate, and culture that
shaped his subjects.

But, although showing differences is vital to McCurry’s work, his
working methods stress our common humanity.

"The first thing you need to do when you approach people is to see them
and relate to them as real people, not somehow quaint or foreign," he
emphasizes. "If you can just relate to people as real people and establish
some rapport, whether you joke around with them or whatever, people
respond and open up, and are happy to be photographed. I don’t think
there’s any mystery or trick about it. I think a lot of times the mistake
people make, is that they see these people as different. But once you
break that ice they’re like anybody else. They just happen to be working
in a field or as a monk in a monastery. The thing that fascinates me is
that we’re all playing these different roles but we’re all part of the
same human race. We’re the same, but we do things in different ways. We
eat different food live in different houses speak different
languages."

Steve McCurry: Kyaikto, Burma, 2004

Despite these common human elements that bind us together, McCurry’s
success and his safety depend on a careful understanding of the very real
differences between the peoples and cultures of the different regions he
visits. One of the most significant, he has noticed, is the religious
difference between Buddhism and other religions.

"If there was one religion I admire, it’s Buddhism," he confides. "With
the Buddhists that I’ve encountered, there’s compassion, there’s a respect
for all life, and there’s lots of peace and serenity. There’s a
non-judgmental quality. If you look at all these statues and images of Buddha around the World he
has this very loving, very compassionate atmosphere. There’s this real
sense of wisdom and acceptance. There is this love that exudes that I
think people find comforting. Also in most Buddhist cultures, women have a
place of respect and very equal status."

His positive experience of Buddhism contrasts markedly with his
experience of Islam, which he has seen under especially difficult
conditions in the Afghan War and
the first Gulf War.

"With other religions there’s a kind of violent energy," he says.
"Often if you don’t conform, or you don’t respect ‘our way of thinking,’
then there’s violent consequences. In Buddhist societies you don’t find
that. If you desecrated a sacred text or a temple, there would be a
tempered response."

In the destruction of the giant statues of Buddha committed by Afghanistan’s
Taliban government in 2001, McCurry has seen and photographed such
desecration. But, for him, this has proved the superiority of
Buddhism.

Steve McCurry: Bamiyan, Afghanistan,
1993

"Buddhism has this whole sense of the impermanence of life," he says of
this act of cultural vandalism that shocked the World. "There is a cycle.
Things are born and they pass away. Buddhist monks make sand mandalas and
then they destroy them, because the World is continuously in flux. I think
Buddhists were more surprised at the destruction of the statues than
angry. Part of the problem of Islam is that people get so emotional about
religion, and they’re so quick to want to defend it by violent means,
because they feel that they’ve been disrespected."

For someone who has made a career out of photographing the rich colors
and varied shapes of Asia, McCurry has done remarkably little work in
Japan. None of the portraits in Looking East feature Japanese
subjects. Is Japan perhaps too westernized to be photogenic?

"I’ve been there many times," he replies. "The most recent time, I was
doing an assignment for National Geographic in Kyoto as part of a
worldwide survey of Buddhism, and I visited a few Zen monasteries in
Kyoto, and went to Kamakura. But in Japan, something like Buddhism isn’t
really that vital for people’s lives. They may consider themselves
Buddhist, but I don’t think it really matters that much to them on a daily
basis."

In addition to Japan losing touch with its traditional culture, another
problem for McCurry may simply be the pace of life. Much of his best work
comes from simple patience and waiting for the photo to happen, something
that is not always easy in fast-paced megalopolis like Tokyo.

"Well, certainly it’s more fun to wander through the streets of a small
village in Tibet, where most people walk and are on the street, than it
would be in Tokyo," he comments. "I’m not sure how many people in Japan
spend time out on the street as opposed to driving round in their cars or
their motorcycles."

Perhaps the real reason, however, is that Japanese people are just too
self-conscious in front of a camera to be natural. It is this search for
unaffected naturalness combined with the exoticism of authentically
diverse and unique cultures that has led McCurry to explore the by-ways
rather than the busy, modernizing highways of Asia, and, in doing so, he
has succeeded like no-one else in capturing the face of this remarkable
continent.

Steve McCurry: Lhasa, Tibet, 2000

"Most of the time people are very happy to meet me," he sums up. "They
don’t think of me as a photographer. They don’t have any concept of
journalism. They just think of me as some strange guy from some other part
of the world, with a camera."

C. B. Liddell is a Tokyo-based journalist
who writes on culture for the International Herald Tribune Asahi Shimbun
newspaper. He last interviewed the American jazz pianist Keith
Jarrett for Culturekiosque.com